Thanks for the post. I found you through a G search for how to rank a YouTube video. I honestly think with the recent G update, they are trying to force their adwords and YT and everything else they own to the user. So I think that the new “niche site” is going to be YT videos. I lost a ton of rankings to my niche site over the weekend. My entire website went from average 800 UV a day to 10… Really made my heart sink. Just as I was starting to do well with SEO ha ha.

I read this post months ago. Now that I’ve got around 80 videos and 90 subs, I read it again with a different eye. Trying to really understand ‘keyword’. If I understand you, the keyword isn’t the ENTIRE title. It’s 2 or 3 words that you’re trying to make a video on, the rest is ‘filler’ so that the title makes sense. Is that correct? If so, I’ve been doing this all wrong. And should probably go thru and change all of my video titles. Oh, and I thought we were supposed to fill in all 500 characters of video tags. I’ve been trying to do that. Have I been stuffing without realizing it? Thanks for the great post!

Your the first person that I have found that has mentioned a “video search” in Google. This is a GREAT point that I will continue to look for and title in the right way to acquire these searches. I do mostly local SEO, and many of the terms that I want to target are not viable as “video searches” per say. I have found that combining reviews with local search terms works well, and that videos can rank about 5x faster than traditional SEO when done correctly.
Just for the record I make a substantial living from YouTube marketing and I also run my own SEO firm with over 250 clients with Google Front Page Rankings. Now I use Fiverr for my YouTube rankings and I agree with Brian but would also like to add a little more value. After you do what Brian suggest visit Fiver and find someone that dripfeeds views for 20 days. 100 views a day for 20 consecutive days works wonders with the right backlink profiles. I’ve ranked for several medium competition keywords without any backlinks. Google will rank your video with social signals from just YouTube. Here is my formula 100 likes, 50 comments, 10% dislikes, 100 subscribers driven from the video, 50 video embeds and about 250 Facebook shares and likes, then build backlinks. There is a link to my Youtube channel feel free to Google search any of my keywords.
Youtube videos seem top of the search for almost everything now.I get Youtube is a massive cash cow for Google, but a lot of these videos that outrank traditional web pages are rubbish. It’s getting to the point where Google are compromising their own search engine. By the time you’ve scrolled past the ads and the videos, you may as well start on page two.

Thanks for sharing and explaining the Ultimate Youtube SEO guide, very helpfull! I have a question, is it better to rank hosted videos (for example Wistia) which don’t show up in Youtube or to rank Youtube videos? Hosted videos show up in google video and take the visitor directly to your page while youtube does not (only in description). Which video platform would you advise?

It good to see someone out there is genuinely trying to help out others to achieve their dreams and goal. Me and my husband have recently started a youtube channel by the name of “foodeasywithsana”. It is a channel about cooking. It has been so hard to get subscribers and views. We are trying to engage audience on many different social networking platforms but the response is very slow. Please can you help us out here. We are lost rightnow.
SIDENOTE. The endscreen needs to be baked into your video during the editing process. For our endscreen, both the subscribe circle and “next video” sections are blank. When you add end screen elements, it’ll fill those sections. The subscribe sphere should be 196 x 196 px and the video or playlist rectangle is 410px x 230px. Here’s a free template you can download.
Thanks for sharing and explaining the Ultimate Youtube SEO guide, very helpfull! I have a question, is it better to rank hosted videos (for example Wistia) which don’t show up in Youtube or to rank Youtube videos? Hosted videos show up in google video and take the visitor directly to your page while youtube does not (only in description). Which video platform would you advise?
Great article about youtube videos, but I have a question. I see that you start link building within a few days. What types of links are you building to your site? I heard some people are even spamming links to youtube. I would think that even if google is ok with that now, in the future they might not like it at all and punish you badly. I know you aslo mentioned social signals, is that your only link building? Thanks
Hey Eddy, my name is Stanford Pelage I am a YouTube and Google seo expert. I’ve made several comments on this thread and I would suggest that you went through the entire comments and look click ctrl f and type mrpelge and read all of my comments, that would drastically help you. The thing about YouTube Google rankings since April 2014 Google had a major update, many vseo have been crying but the solution is pretty simple. Treat your important videos like a website, don’t over optimize and don’t keyword stuff. Everyone says to do long articles, I would recommend a 1,000-1,500 word unique article for YouTube videos with a lot of competition. Don’t spam your video filename, don’t spam the tags. Just 3-5 tags would be sufficient. Main keyword,main keyword with an s and an lsi keyword and what your product does would be perfect, don’t want to confuse Google, that represents spam.
Longer content not only helps in adding more keywords to it, but there is also a natural emphasis on information. The authenticity of a post increases with longer text, which means that Google would recognize it as something more relevant than a shorter and concise text. As search patterns are synonymous with long tail keywords nowadays, a longer text also improves the chances of your article/website to be on a higher ranking than others.